Ryan Singel

Ryan Singel is a Media and Strategy Fellow at Stanford Law School’s Center for Internet and Society.

Singel covered net neutrality, privacy, security, surveillance and tech policy for Wired from 2002 to 2012. He co-founded and later edited the award-winning Threat Level blog at Wired.

Singel founded Contextly, an engagement platform for publishers. Drawing on this experience as a startup founder and CEO, Singel wrote official comments on behalf of Contextly in the 2014 Open Internet proceedings, detailing how open internet rules were a pre-requisite for the founding and success of the company. After those comments were highlighted by media outlets, Singel was invited to represent small startups at a meeting with then-FCC chairman Tom Wheeler as he considered how best to institute formal neutrality rules.

Funding:

Ryan Singel’s salary, research support, and travel* are funded through the general budget of Stanford Law School and are independent of the budget and funding of the Center for Internet and Society. The Center for Internet and Society does not accept corporate funding for its network neutrality-related work.

"“The net neutrality repeal, at its heart, is really a way to allow the companies that we pay to get online, the Comcasts, the AT&Ts, the Verizons of the world, to make more money by figuring out how to get money out of the businesses that are online,” said Ryan Singel, the Media and Strategy Fellow at Stanford Law School’s Center for Internet and Society on a call with Jezebel."

"Ryan Singel, a fellow at the Center for Internet and Society at Stanford Law School, believes that legislation may survive judicial scrutiny, and the political prospects for defending the ruling are dim. “The sheer number of efforts across the states and across party lines goes to show how badly ISPs and FCC Chairman Ajit Pai misplayed their hands by ramming through a total repeal of net neutrality protections without regard to public or expert input,” he wrote by email. “It’s likely a preview of net neutrality being a prominent issue in the 2018 mid-terms and beyond.”"

"Oversight is a known issue in the ad industry, said Ryan Singel, co-founder of the publishing-tools firm Contextly: “If legitimate ad platforms actually did any due diligence, this scam would be far less profitable.”"

"With the Dec. 14 repeal, Comcast and others will be able to charge content companies exorbitant fees without, technically, blocking. This fundamentally changes how the internet works, argues Ryan Singel, a fellow at the Center for Internet and Society at Stanford Law School. Any website or service may now have to pay ISPs to load, reducing the number and variety of free services. Expect telecoms to exploit this power extracting maximum fees and deterring new entrants."

"Ryan Singel, a fellow at Stanford Law School’s Center for Internet and Society and a former reporter at Wired, agrees that it’s hard to imagine the Googles and Facebooks of the world doing things differently after net neutrality’s repeal. “These guys can afford to pay for fast lanes”—the priority treatment that ISPs will soon be permitted to charge for—“they can afford to pay access fees, they have the clout to make sure that when they do pay for those, that they get a better rate than someone else,” Singel says."

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The Center for Internet and Society (CIS) is a public interest technology law and policy program at Stanford Law School and a part of Law, Science and Technology Program at Stanford Law School. CIS brings together scholars, academics, legislators, students, programmers, security researchers, and scientists to study the interaction of new technologies and the law and to examine how the synergy between the two can either promote or harm public goods like free speech, innovation, privacy, public commons, diversity, and scientific inquiry.